I would like to announce that some testing images of the Angstrom Linux distribution containing the Opie user environment version 1.2.3 are now available. For most devices, this is the first time Opie 1.2.3 has been available in a distribution in any form, and once testing and debugging has finished we hope that this will give access to Opie to more users.

If you have one of the following listed devices, we would love to hear feedback on how well it works for you:

From there you can find information on how to download and run an image on your device as well as some known issues.

Opie is now on the path to becoming a supported choice of environment within Angstrom, and we expect the testing period to last for at least a month, during which time we will be collecting information and fixing serious bugs where they are found.

Development is a little slow at the moment seeing as I'm pretty much the only person working on Opie. I haven't done much on it lately either as I'm moving to the UK in a week's time, but I hope to get back into it soon. There aren't any packages for the browser (Konqueror Embedded) but it probably wouldn't require much more work to produce them.

The rotated directional keys issue is known - Opie and Qt/E are both trying to handle rotating the keys. I really have to sit down and come up with a patch to disable Qt/E's code for this so we can move forward.

which version have kernel-2.6.23 or which angstrom-opie version run better on sl-c3200?

The current opie images to the best of my knowledge all come with 2.6.24 as default.

So the following steps would be necessary:

1.) install the 2.6.23 kernel module packages via ipkg from the angstrom feed or unpack the 2.6.23 module tar.gz directly on /root. It can be downloaded from http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/unsta...utobuild/akita/ (put in your device instead of akita if necessary).2.) Download the akita 2.6.23 kernel image from the angstrom autobuild directory (see above), put it on the CF or SD card from which you would like to flash and rename it to zImage.bin. Remove the initrd.bin file but keep updater.sh3.) Start the flashing procedure. It will only reflash the kernel image (if no initrd.bin is on the card) and keep anything else on the Zaurus.

After rebooting it should be working out of the box. Check with "uname -a" the kernel version. You can then remove the 2.6.24 modules from /lib if anyhting is ok.

I would like to see this project move forward as I prefer Opie over GPE. Is there any published documentation on how to port or compile applications to Opie from the GPE builds? Is this even required?

There is no easy way to port applications from GPE to Opie.Opie is based on Qt/embedded (currently the outdated 2.3.x version) working directly on the framebuffer while GPE bases upon X and gtk libraries.

Most applications available for GPE are not even tied to GPE, but standard desktop applications like Sylpheed, Abiword, etc while Opie apps are often tailored to the Opie platform.

If you'd like to see Opie advance, there are plenty of tasks of which is the most important the port to Qt/Embedded 4.x.Another task which is rather debatable is to build Opie upon Qt and X instead of Qt/Embedded which would allow running X apps and Opie apps together but for the price of a loss of performance.